Mike the Ranger

1. Tampa

One of the nicer places to visit on the west coast of Florida is this little city called St. Petersburg. It shares its name with that other Saint Petersburg, the one that is the second most populous city in Russia, and that is on purpose. Turns out (and I didn’t know this until I looked it up just now) that it got its name in a coin flip.

In 1888, this rich white dude from Detroit named John C. Williams bought a huge chunk of land right on the Gulf of Mexico, where the coast-line curved inward forming a natural harbor curtained by a series of small islands and sandbars. It was mostly swampland, as most of Florida is, but it had some damn nice beaches. Around the same time, this other rich white dude named Peter Demens, a railway owner and descendant of Russian royalty, decided to bring the ole’ ‘choo choo’ right through the land purchased by John C. Williams. And so a mutually beneficial business relationship created the groundwork for what would become a full-fledged city. But before any of that happened, they needed a name. Williams wanted to name the city Detroit, as that was where he was born. Demens however, had spent most of his life in the Russian Saint Petersburg, and wanted this new city to carry that name. So, as only rich white folks can do, instead of naming it after some great king, or a war hero, or one of the many, many Native Americans that died in Florida as a result of genocide and colonialism, they decided to flip a coin to name an entire fucking city. And so St. Petersburg was born.

Fast forward to present day and it is now a magnet for tourism. The modest skyline, beautiful beaches with crystal-clear water, and relatively small population for a city, made “St. Pete” quite a nice place to live in. Lots of rich folks live there now, many of whom happen to be wealthy Europeans. The city is as quaint as a city can be; nice store fronts, few, if any homeless people, low crime rate, clean streets – you look up pictures of this place on Google images and it looks just as pleasant as it actually is in real life. It’s a nice fucking city.

St. Pete however, does have one problem. It’s adjacent to, and a short drive across a bridge from, the concrete garbage dump that is Tampa. Just hearing the name makes me feel like I need some disinfectant wipes. If you look up pictures of Tampa, you’ll see the same five shots of the downtown area from the sea. The first reason for this is that if they moved the camera ten feet in any other direction, you’re all the sudden in a Mad Max movie set. The second reason for this is that anyone who has spent any time in Tampa at all has a sudden and potent urge to drown themselves; this hits photographers especially hard.

Here’s some perspective: When I started writing this, I googled St. Petersburg. The first three news stories that came up where: “St. Pete agency creates a national beer rebrand”, “St. Pete Beach settles on city manager candidate”, and the always comforting “Martin Luther King Jr. parade warms up St. Pete crowd on a brisk day.” Holy shit, doesn’t that sound nice? They got a nice beer scene, stable politics, and they are having a gay old time warming each-other up in an MLK parade. How great would it be to live in a city where those are the top stories of the day? Those are some chill vibes all around.

Here’s what the first three news stories were when I googled Tampa: “City of Tampa sues Frontier and Verizon for damage to pipes”, “Missing Tampa man wants to ‘heal people and kill people’ deputies say”, “One bedroom apartments top $1,000.00 as rent rises across Tampa Bay.” I didn’t make any of those up. I didn’t have to try to make Tampa seem unappealing. There’s crazy religious nuts going around administering first-aid to people and then stabbing them to death, all while running in wastewater because Verizon didn’t check before it started digging holes… and people want to pay over a grand a month on a place they’ll never own to live in that shithole. Are you sold yet?

I can’t emphasize this enough, those really were the top three stories that popped-up when I googled these places. What more evidence do you need? That nice, urban oasis that is St. Pete, is unfairly marred by its proximity to the city equivalent of incontinence.

And in that anal-leakage of a town, there’s a middling state school named the University of South Florida. This place is filled almost exclusively with locals and people who could not make the grades or didn’t have the money to get into the University of Miami. And it is here, where yours truly went to school. And it is here, where our story really begins. The story of how I almost got turned into dog-food because of an asshole named Justin.

2. Latin America

Scott Ickes was one smooth motherfucker. He was one of these guys that have never had an awkward moment that did not somehow make him seem more charming. Slim, tan, excellent bone structure, impeccably dressed, and the cherry on top? A motherfucking South African accent. Wrap it up folks, it’s over!

Only thing that would have made this guy more impossibly irresistible was if he became something super fascinating like… I don’t know… a professor and researcher of Latin American history who spoke fluent Portuguese because his area of study was Brazil? Triple. Fucking. Check.

You had to be really secure in your masculinity to not be intimidated by this guy. When he took stage, eyes were on him. I can’t even begin to imagine how many uncomfortable encounters he must’ve had with 20-something college girls clumsily attempting to flirt with him. Do they make windshield wipers for pussy? If so, this guy needed a Costco-sized box of them.

Mr. Ickes, or just “Scott” – as he liked to be called, because of course he fucking did – just so happened to be my very first college professor at the University of South Florida. He taught an introductory Latin American history class that would mysteriously be the only history class that regularly had to expand the registration limit. Equally mysterious, was the 3 to 1 female to male student ratio that seemed to afflict the class semester after semester… weird.

So in I walk on my first day of class, thinking I’m hot shit with my over-long hair and my above-average knowledge on Latin American history. I have always been a bit of an arrogant prick, but there was something about the college environment that amplified my worst instincts. I spoke loudly and with authority on subjects I only had superficial knowledge about, I annoyingly decided that I liked jazz that year and spoke about it any chance I had because everyone needed to know I was more sophisticated than them, and had some pseudo-philosophical opinion on just about any subject brought up in lectures that I just had to voice. Yeah, I was pretty annoying. And now that I think about it, I have not changed all that much. Sorry everyone.

But somehow, I still managed to charm people here and there, and shortly after sitting down I started making friends with a couple of people around me. Class had not started yet so I was chatting up a couple of girls that were in my proximity; I’m Cuban so I did this rather loudly and since I was surrounded by freshmen who were all as socially anxious as I pretended I was not (I’ve always been good at lying to myself) this made me the center of attention, a spot I felt comfortable in because I have many undiagnosed psychological disorders, namely, narcissism.

At some point in my self-absorbed attempt to be that guy, a spectacled young man dressed as if he was coming from or going to a gym, slipped in the class and sat near me. He soon started partaking in the conversation; he was also loud so I quickly identified him as one of my people. I learned that his name was Justin, we exchanged a couple of jokes about the Cuban culture and as part of the open exchange we were having, I dug into my metaphorical bag of corny jokes I use in conversations to seem more likeable, and hit everyone with the classic “And I’m a Miami Dolphins fan, which means that I am quite used to pain and mediocrity.” Admittedly, this is a terrible joke, but somehow, within the confines of awkward ‘getting-to-know-you’ type of situations, it always killed. Turns out, Justin was also a Dolphins fan – at this point I would like to note that Justin really enjoyed this shitty joke and would go on to use it just about every time he had to introduce himself to a large group of people – and so, much like John C. Williams and Peter Demens a century before, we too struck a life-long friendship.

What happened in that class is of little interest to the rest of the story, which I know is bad penmanship because I spent two paragraphs setting up Professor Ickes, a character which I will now abandon, and never revisit. But if I’m being honest, I did that just for me as a type of mental masturbation. I still dream about him sometimes.

Anyway…

Justin and I became fast friends. We learned that we had very similar tastes in movies, TV shows, videogames, and sports. We tended to broadly agree on political and philosophical views. We shared just about everything except an affinity for drugs which I had developed in high-school while he was too busy developing his own vice of kleptomania. He was pretty anti-drugs (which I found very hypocritical on the count of him being a degenerate klepto), a ridiculous ideology I managed to break him out of after we became roommates two years later and got him to smoke pot for the first time. No shit, the man closed his eyes and started dancing in front of a television that was powered off, while talking about seeing lobster people or some shit; we laughed hysterically and ate an unjustifiable amount of food that evening, it was a great time and from that day on Justin was as pro-drugs as they come.

Needless to say, what started as a passing acquaintance in a Latin American History class quickly became one of the best friendships I’ve ever had. Years later, we are still the best of friends and in that time we have managed to create many fond, and some not-so-fond, memories together.

One of our more memorable moments happened on my twenty-first birthday. The day we willingly walked into the home of a complete stranger that could have totally been a serial killer.

3. Cinemark

Justin always had a flair for the dramatic. A quality which I think was at least partially responsible for leading him to eventually choosing a career as a trial lawyer, and one that I’d be willing to wager will make him a damn good one.

This quality, however, does not present itself with flair or extravagance, but rather lends itself more to the narrative aspects surrounding certain events. It is a meek form of dramatism, one that mirrors Justin’s outward appearance. He was never one for fancy clothes, flashiness, or attention whoring. The drama that Justin enjoyed often revealed itself in his fanciful story-telling, an act which often involved taking certain “artistic freedoms” when he assumed the role of raconteur (one he noticeably reveled in). While a normal person might tell you the story of a bad date by merely hitting on the highlights and accentuating the comical aspects of the event; Justin was the type that would provide extensive background about his mental and emotional state at the time, tell you about what led to the evening and what they were wearing, what they talked about and how it landed, heightening the sense of anticipation with often not-so-accurate details, all for the sake of delivering what he perceived to be an exciting or humorous climax (or just humorous if you were one of his lovers). That is to say that Justin loved talking shit. He was good at it, and to the detriment of our legal system, he’s getting better.

It is perhaps for this reason why he thought that going out the night before my birthday and awaiting the stroke of midnight for my first legal drink, sounded like a great idea. Maybe it would make for a better story in his head and so he pressed the notion. One which I agreed to because of two reasons: One, I genuinely enjoyed his company, he and I have always been kindred spirits, our conversations always lively and enjoyable and time together often flies in laughter. Second, and perhaps most importantly, I didn’t have shit to do that night, so fuck it.

We met up early in the evening, so we needed to kill some time before we tried to find a less-than-shady place have a drink on a Wednesday night. We were mid-spring break and neither of us fancied getting drunk for a week in Panama Beach, so we decided to stay home and play videogames until school resumed; great minds and all that.

So what better way for two self-described “home-bodies” to celebrate a cultural milestone in the life of a young man, than to go to a movie theater? The answer is that there is no better way.

We decided on a local Cinemark which was equidistant to both of our homes, because nothing says “Happy Birthday” like convenience. This above-average movie theater was in an upper middle class suburban neighborhood, which means it was Egyptian Themed, because, America.

The movie we picked was a comedic-heist-drama called Focus. To describe this Will Smith, Margot Robbie vehicle, as Mr. & Mrs. Smith meets Ocean’s Twelve would not be unfair. And yes, I chose Ocean’s Twelve purposely. I also vaguely remember the advertising really leaning on the interracial couple aspect of the movie, but that could just be me being racist. We are all people after all and race is a social construct.

We were really stretching our college student budget with the twelve dollar movie tickets, but this was a special occasion. Citing this fact, we decided to get real crazy and get some movie theater food.

After exchanging our regret-money with the cashier for a ticket that promised a basket full of fried and cheesy self-loathing, we approached the pick-up window. – I’d like to digress for a second and here and state that if Purgatory were a real place, it would look like the pick-up window at a busy movie theater. Few places manage to make people feel that many combinations of emotions; helplessness, anxiety, frustration, entitlement, and I already made a reference to the self-loathing. This is one of the very few places in which I would not be entirely surprised if someone pulled a gun out, put it in their mouth, and pulled the trigger. Don’t get me wrong, I would be horrified and immediately call for help, but I would kinda get it. – Lucky for us, people have lives and Wednesday nights don’t happen to be particularly busy for the movie theater industry, which helped dampen the sadness a little bit. It was in this pit of despair in which we would meet one of the strangest people I have ever interacted with. Mike the Ranger.

4. The Ranger

How does one describe Mike the Ranger? How does one describe anything that escapes comprehension? How could I ever explain to you in words what the Aurora Borealis looks like and do it justice? How could I tell you what it felt like to have authentic gelato while sitting on the steps facing the Trevi Fountain? How do you explain the humor of Brody Stevens?

Some things just need to be experienced.

But I kind of dug myself into a hole here as the last chapters of this anecdote heavily revolve around Mike, so I will make an attempt.

Let’s start with the physical attributes since those are easier. Mike was a man of short stature and round of face. He had thick, brown eyebrows which nearly intersected at the glabella (yeah motherfuckers, glabella, that’s the space between your eyebrows, look that shit up fam. You’re welcome.) He had a weak chin, barely covered with stubble indicating a few days growth. He had a red trucker hat, which was ok, this was 2015, you could still wear those then. These were simpler times.

He wore a white wife-beater which barely covered a beer belly he had to be curating for at least a decade. His Adonis-like figure was lazily covered in a stained grey sweater. Mike had chosen that night to don dark-green cargo shorts, and I loved him for it. And on his feet, and if I’ve done a good enough job describing this man thus far you should have already guessed, he wore black flip-flops, because of course he did. Think of a trailer-park Big Lebowski and you’re more or less getting the picture.

Mike was alone.

Mike was hungry.

I do not remember exactly what was in his tray, but I do remember that it required a tray, and that it was enough food to make me feel better about myself. This is no small feat. I really don’t like myself.

Justin and I exchanged glances and we smiled; smiles of barely contained laughter, smiles of judgement, smiles that said “hey, at least we are not that guy.” We are not good people.

We took our food and walked towards the theater in which the movie was being screened and were surprised that this man, who we did not know as Mike just yet, happened to be heading to the same theater. We were even more surprised at realizing that this man was seated directly behind us in a mostly empty movie theater, and much less surprised when he started talking to himself.

I will say, at least the talking was not the mad ramblings of a psychologically disturbed man, which is what I would have been expecting at that point. It was honest and fair criticism of the film: “How did he land without hurting himself?” “You mean they just met and already love each other?” “That plan makes no sense.” I really could not disagree with any of his takes.

The movie ended and we left the theater with Mike on our tails. We still had quite some time to kill before mid-night, so we stopped at the lobby and talked about what we could do to burn the couple of remaining hours. As we began to narrow down our options, we hear a very frustrated voice just a few feet away from us. The man who had just sat behind us and played Roger Ebert for the entire movie, was on his cell-phone, noticeably annoyed. He hung up and I made the first mistake of the night. I made eye-contact with Mike.

5. The Ride

Remember what I told you about Justin? How he has an interest in drama? Sometimes I think the guy puts himself in shit situations just so he can have a story out of it. I would honestly respect it more if the stories were of exciting adventure or imminent peril. But most of the time, it’s about him putting himself in awkward and uncomfortable situations which could have been easily avoided. Sometimes I wish his self-sabotage looked more like it did this night. Because when the stakes are high, the story is better.

After I made eye contact with trailer park Lebowski, he approached us and began to talk to us. He said “Hi, I’m Mike”, and other things.

Turns out, he had called a taxi service at some point and his driver had canceled. He tried getting another one but he would have to wait about half an hour. Those pre-Uber days, might as well have been the Dark Ages.

After listening to his story about not being able to get a ride, he asked us if we could take him home. I, a normal, fairly-well-adjusted person, began to make a mental list of plausible reasons to deny this potential psycho. Justin being Justin, without so much as an exploratory glance to see if I was ok with this exchange, happily volunteered his vehicle. At that point I knew we were both going to die because I may be lot of things, but I am not a bad friend. I am a motherfucking rider. If I were a girl, I’d be the type to give a man road-head, on a dirt track, right after he came back from a noon-time run. That’s just the type of person I am. I was not about to let Justin get murdered alone.

Mike was elated to have made friends. His mood changed instantly and walked away for a minute to cancel the second taxi. I took the opportunity to punch Justin on the shoulder and say something along the lines of “Dude, what the fuck is your problem?!” To which Justin responded “If we don’t get killed it might make for a good story!” or some other annoying shit which showed an equal lack of foresight and self-preservation.

Our trio of misfits left the theater and we all boarded Justin’s car. I, a natural tactician, thought it best to take the back seat and let Mike shut-gun it. In my head, worse came to worst and I could put the dude in a headlock. Flawless plan.

Turns out, Mike was a talker. Who could have seen that coming? You mean the guy that talked to himself through an entire feature-length film, was into talking ceaselessly? No way.

But what started as annoying pleasantries, quickly unraveled into a cavalcade of insanity. The man had some wild stories that just sounded like complete bullshit. He talked about being rich and owning a Porsche which was conveniently being worked on, he talked about raising show dogs and winning competitions with them, he said his grandfather founded IHOP and invested into gold, and that he had joined the army and became a paratrooper and a ranger. He told us that his friends called him “Mike the Ranger” and that we could call him that if we wanted. All this coming from one of the most unremarkable-looking dudes I have ever seen. Unbelievable claim after unbelievable claim coming from what looked like a divorced plumber. And so we went along with it, laughing here and there at how absurd this all sounded. Mike probably thought that our laughs were from amusement and not disbelief, because he kept right on talking, and we kept right on nodding along, barely able to keep our eyes from rolling.

And that’s when the pictures starting coming out.

Mike pulled out a cell-phone and started going through his gallery. First it was just a few pictures of him next to fancy cars. Alright, anyone can go to a car show. Then he showed us a few, clearly well-bred and groomed dogs. Okay, now this is a little weird, bit of an elaborate ruse, probably had some friend who owned these nice dogs. Then came a picture of a much younger Mike. He was slim and fit, wearing what clearly was a military uniform and holding some sort of automatic rifle. He swiped one more time and there was a picture of Mike laying on a cot with another weapon close by. Another swipe and there were pictures of Mike in foreign countries in his military apparel. Couple of more swipes and there was Mike on a plane, wearing a parachute, then another one of mike jumping off said plane, then another one of him on the ground picking up his parachute. Was this motherfucker telling us the truth the entire fucking time? I barely managed to ask myself that question before realizing where he had guided us to.

In our trance of disbelief, Mike had taken us to a poorly lit neighborhood. It had to be an equestrian area as the houses were pretty far apart from each other. And these were fucking houses. I mean, enormous, easily million dollar homes. The further into this neighborhood we drove the larger and more extravagant the houses became. And then we came to a massive, beautifully adorned gate. Mike asked us to pull up to the call box, he reached out and dialed some numbers and the gates parted to reveal a winding path that went over a small bridge and turned into what was to me, the biggest fucking house I ever saw.

6. The Castle

As we drove up on a hand-laid brick road, to what can only be described as a castle, Mike explained to us that this mansion was designed and built by his grandfather. Which, if you were paying attention, Mike had claimed was the founder of IHOP, and at this point, I was fully prepared to believe him.

Mike the Ranger told us that his mother was a big fan of Disney growing up and so his grandfather had an entire house built to resemble the Disney castle. And that it did. The house looked like it reached four stories in some placed. Tower-like sections overlooked an intricately-tiled roof. It was night time, but the light blue of the outside walls could be clearly seen thanks to the bright exterior lights hidden in a hedge that circled the entire property. This place looked like a princess toy house, hit with an enlarging ray. I thought I was hallucinating. And I think until that moment, I didn’t really conceptualize what wealth looked like.

Still in disbelief, we pulled into a driveway in which you could fit two of my homes. Mike thanked us and invited us to come inside for a tour. I was absolutely certain that the mansion had dozens of rooms and that at least two of them were torture and death chambers. But my enthusiastic “Fuck yeah!” drowned out whatever horror-movie knowledge and evolutionary instinct of self-preservation I had remaining after realizing that Mike was not lying at any point throughout the evening. I could have very well been walking into the real-life Hostel movie and I was all in because this sort of thing did not happen every day. Justin was right on this one, the story was too good. I had to see this through.

I stepped out onto a pile of dog turds. This is not a metaphor for the series of bad decisions that had led to this moment or the future bad decisions to come. I mean a literal pile of dog turds. After looking around for a second I quickly realized that the actual chances of finding concrete were smaller than finding a platform of canine feces. The entire front of the house was covered in small piles of dog shit. The whole thing looked like some strange artistic commentary on the Vietnam War.

Mike saw me trying to clean up the bottom of my shoe and apologized.

“Sorry, my dogs shit everywhere.”

Thanks Mike, I could have guessed that much.

We walked up to a comically lavish set of double doors. The fact that he opened them with an average set of keys you could get at Home Depot seemed surreal.

The doors hinged inward and for a moment I felt what it would be like to uncover the lost tomb of some long-forgotten pharaoh. It was like that moment in The Mummy when Brendan Fraser opens up the sarcophagus and gets hit with two thousand year-old stale death-breeze. Except in my case, it was the sealed smell of dog shit. It was potent. I actually staggered a little bit and it took my senses a second to get reoriented and hear the sound of what seemed like an entire pound barking in our direction.

I should note now so I don’t keep mentioning it, Justin and I exchanged quizzical looks with each other after every weird event. It was our way of re-affirming to each other that this was in fact reality.

We followed Mike into this cavernous building and the smell was quickly replaced with the resurgence of the feeling of awe I felt driving up to the house. The ceilings must have been at least twenty feet high. A giant chandelier overlooked a living-room the size of a mid-sized home. Adjacent to this unjustifiably large living-room, was a kitchen that nearly rivaled it in size.

The kitchen was blocked off on three entrances by the small, retractable gates one would use to keep children or pets from climbing up the stairs. Just behind these barriers were at least thirty dogs. Now that may sound like an exaggeration, but I have at least one witness that may correlate. Granted, if you were to ask Justin he might say there were one hundred.

The dogs were piling over one another. They were all different breeds; Shih Tzus, Chihuahuas, Boxers, German Shepherds… it would take a middle-class white woman to identify all of these breeds. Just trust me when I say there were more than I could reliably count.

Needless to say, the kitchen was littered with dog turds, hence the smell. You can look up pictures of what the crater-filled forest in Verdun looked like after the battle during the First World War and begin to get an idea of how close in proximity these piles of shit were. I have not seen anything like it before or since and I am no stranger to large piles of feces. One thing did stand out, none of these animals looked like show-dogs. If they were, who would keep them in that condition?

I asked Mike as he began to feed this mass of dogs if these were the show dogs he was talking about in the car. He smiled and told us that his parents kept those down-stairs. Downstairs. As in a basement. In South Florida. Just how rich were these people?

He took us downstairs first to see his show dogs. The basement was expectedly massive. There must have been at least twenty cages with the most beautiful Dobermans and Great Danes I have ever seen. These cages were decked out with comfortable-looking padding and large bowls filled with food and water. The South American kids we are putting in concertation camps at the border would gladly be separated from their parents again to get these types of living conditions.

The howling was deafening but brief as Mike jumped into action by hollering at the top of his lungs. He ran down the steps like a madman and pressed his head against the cages, screaming at these dogs until they quieted. I recall him saying something about showing dominance before releasing one of the hounds to play with us. Her name was Princess and her head reached my chest on all fours. Mike took the opportunity to start telling us about his parents’ hobby of raising show dogs. Apparently this is a hobby you can have if you are richer than any minority is even allowed to dream about being. He talked for an uncomfortably long time. It was one of those endless, one-sided conversations that I sometimes find myself in when I go to kitchen at work and make the mistake of asking someone how their day is going. Except at work I can always say that I am busy and that I need to get back to my desk. In this scenario, we were in Mike’s kingdom. If he wanted to talk, we had to listen.

If you are uncomfortable enough, five minutes can feel like hours. We were in that basement for three weeks before he decided to ask us if we wanted a tour. We were in too deep, of course we said yes.

7. Tour

Instead of boring you with needless details, I’ll just go over some highlights on this one.

The first stop in the tour was the back-yard which was also covered in dog shit. There was a pool so immense that it had a ten feet tall waterfall and an entire faux tunnel that wrapped around the perimeter of the pool. It looked like something out of a Disney hotel. Which I guess was kind of the point. Much like so many aspects of this home, the pool was so over the top, that it shot right past good taste and into the realm of gauche.

Just beyond this monstrosity of a pool was a guest house. It paled in comparison to the main house, as to be expected. But realizing at that moment that their idea of a guest house was much, much, bigger than the home I lived in at the time made me a little sick.

Coming back into the house we took an early 20^th century style elevator to the top floor. A fully functional elevator. In a residential home. I don’t even know what to do with that.

The main house had in excess of twenty rooms. We only saw about a dozen but Mike assured us that each had a different theme, and after seeing a couple, we believed him. The first of these rooms was the “Forest Room”. This had belonged to Mikes’ sister growing up. The walls were intricately decorated with woodland imagery; deer and bunnies and birds and shit. Green marble lined the edges of the floor. The floor itself was covered in bristled carpeting meant to resemble grass.

The next room we visited was the master bedroom. I have run out of ways to paint a picture of the scale of things in this house. It goes without saying, the master bedroom had to be the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. Yes, there was a chandelier above the bed, because you can’t be that rich and not fuck under a chandelier. Yes, there was a bathtub big enough to drown ten children in simultaneously, and yes, I really should find a better unit of measure than drowning children. And of course the master bedroom has a balcony which overlooked the chunk of land encompassed by the property. Because what is the point of having all this shit and not take it all in and remind yourself how you totally deserve all of it.

The tour went on like this for a while; room after room of strange and extravagant themes, until we reached Mikes favorite part: The entertainment rooms.

There was the bowling alley. It had two regulation-length lanes fully stocked with bowling balls of every weight and an automated pinsetter. On the corner closest to the entrance there was a fully stocked bar in case you didn’t want to talk thirty feet to the actual bar.

There was the movie theater. This room was meant to imitate an actual theater experience with none of the human interaction. There were classic movie posters everywhere and fancy reclining leather chairs, overlooked by a big screen and what seemed like a professional projector. I thought about why anyone would ever leave to go see a movie like Mike did, and that made me a little sad. It was not until that moment that I started to realize that he probably felt lonely in this ridiculously large house. I became more certain of this notion when we went onto the next room.

The bar-room was themed like an old western saloon. It had two floors, the second of which was an open balcony that hugged the walls surrounding the main bar and stage. There was a small stairway which led to the narrow balcony, we followed Mike up, confused by his statement: “I’ll show you where I sleep.”

On the section of the balcony that hung directly above the bar, Mike had created what can be fairly described as a pillow fort. There were large cozy blankets and thick pillows scattered about forming a nest which faced a television that partly hung over the balcony as it was too wide to fit horizontally in the balcony itself. Mike had hooked up a PlayStation and DVD player to this TV and this is where he had been sleeping while taking care of the house in his parents’ absence. A mansion larger than any other I have seen, filled with rooms of all kinds, all with luxurious beds, and this man had chosen to snuggle himself in this little corner. I found this weirdly profound. There is something to be said about a grown man, with all this wealth, living much like I would if as a child I would have been left alone in a house this immense; unfortunately, I am not insightful enough to know what that is.

Justin and I stared at this bubble of comfy humanity, looked back at each other, and told Mike it was time for us to leave. He looked sad, and for the first time all evening I did not fear that my skin would be used as a lamp-shade in a Silence of the Lambs themed room.

Mike walked us out; making the same painful and rambling small-talk he had subjected us to the entire evening. We got to the car, gave him a hug and thanked him for the tour. He thanked us for the ride and offered to get us hockey tickets which we accepted but never followed up on. We exchanged phone numbers, got in the car and drove away in silence.

I am not sure what Justin was thinking about, and after a few years and I am not entirely sure that I remember what was in my own mind. I’d like to think that I was deep enough to linger on the strange metaphor formed by such wealth and luxury littered by dog crap. I’d like to think that I was ruminating about the juxtaposition of Mike’s appearance and the enormity of the home he lived in. But if I am being truly honest, I was probably just glad that at no point he decided to cage us in with his dogs and watched us as we turned into a human Purina bag.

The silence was broken by laughter shortly after. Neither of us could believe that we were dumb enough to put ourselves in such a strange and potentially perilous situation. We talked all the way to a near-by bar where we sat and waited for midnight. Justin bought me my first legal drink. It was a Jack and Coke, because I’m classless. We sat there and drank for a while talking about how strange the night had been. Shortly thereafter, we hugged and parted ways. As far as birthdays go, it was one of the best I’ve ever had.

I’m not sure how to end this. I think there is a lesson in there somewhere. Something about not judging books by their covers or money not buying happiness. I don’t really know and even if I did I am never going to be someone who you should take advice from. So if you come away with anything from this story, let it be this: If you ever happen to stumble upon a creepy looking dude, with stained clothes and a beer-belly, and he asks you for a ride home on a weeknight while few people are around, the chances of him being a Mike the Ranger are pretty fucking small. So run, run away as fast as you can, because you are just seconds away from your decapitated head becoming his Fleshlight.